welcome! jeremy freese is a professor in sociology at northwestern university. he finds blogging to be a good diversion from insomnia and a far better use of time than television.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

the dream of jeremy-freese-with-nothing-in-between

So, you know sometimes people get together and carry forth some idea like all dying their hair or getting tattoos. Tomorrow, by coincident circumstances, I might be present as the forms are filled out so that someone else can change their name. As some JFW readers know, I have long voiced a hankering to legally change my name. While this desire has sometimes led to more grandiose claims about what I might perpetrate on myself if armed with a change-of-name form, the abiding desire has been just to drop my middle name, which would stop that mayhem that has ensued every since I took a blood oath of vengence against anyone who ever dared say it aloud.

29 comments:

Can we all throw in our two cents as to what you may want to consider instead of the trusty but dusty JF? (I hope the person looking over the forms tomrrow is an attorney in good standing. Not one of those suspended types who is not legit due to nonpayment of dues, for instance.)

After getting suckered into a B.A. diploma with my middle name RIGHT THERE WRITTEN ON IT IN INK, I declined to inform my graduate school that such a name even existed. Two more diplomas, no middle name. Much better.

I've managed to keep my given first name (I have four total) off both my BA and my MS, but when I moved to Wisconsin, the post office also failed to forward mail addressed to me by that name (despite the last name being the same), causing my student loan people to believe that I had changed my name and fled my payments. I had to send them a copy of my social security card to work that out.

Anon 8:16: If he changed it to 'Weblog,' someone would promptly mispronounce it "WEE-blawgh." I'm sorry to say that people are that dumb.

RWS: The "fun" postal fact is that the Postal Service errs on the side of not forwarding mail (to prevent, say, an entire household's mail from being forwarded when one member moves out) by being very persnickety about matching the entire names of addressees to forwarding orders. For best results next move, list as many variations on your name as might appear on your mail as you can fit on the form.

Trust me, to the detached observer, my middle name is underwhelming, but I don't like it.

Yesterday one of the anonymous commenters on this post noted that my middle initial was "J" by providing a link to the page on a UW site that has all the salaries for myself and colleagues in my department. State institution salaries are public record, and as such my earlier impulse was not to delete it. However, I decided that allowing the comment was too much like posting the salaries myself, which I'm not interested in doing, and so I deleted it.

(Not to mention that I wasn't sure if there was something ulterior or weird motivating whoever it was to link to salary info, given that there is ample other online documentation of both my middle initial and, for that matter, my middle name.)

Throughout my childhood, mentioning my mother's middle name (an innocuous left-over surname, as far as I could tell) was a great way to get her to start screaming at you, and not in a humorous way. People are a little weird about these things.

There was no ulterior motive in the link. Sorry 'bout that. Just seemed the most obvious source of the middle initial (and while your middle initial, and perhaps name, is on-line, it is rather hard to find it without knowing it).

Geez. I'm amazed entire budgets of major public universities are available to anyone with an internet connection. Guess it make sense philosphically (it is a public institution), though the salary stuff seems a little invasive.